Haunted Hearts (3 page)

Still, she didn’t hesitate. “
Oui
,” she said, standing and putting out her hand as he offered her his arm.

He led her past the crowd of people feasting, talking, laughing, to a small area some intrepid dancers had carved out for themselves as a dance floor. She heard the strains of a waltz. Having learned the dance from her sister, Olivia was delighted to get to perform the daring gambol at a real party.
And no less than with a handsome, mysterious stranger
. This was why she’d come tonight, to do what she’d too seldom--or never--done before.

She’d had a few dances as a debutante, but too few. She and Stratton had danced but twice together. At two-and-seventy years old, the closest her groom had come to being of a dancing mind had been the handful of extremely awkward bedroom antics Olivia had endured with him. But at least because of Stratton she now knew men, too, had nipples…as clearly did their host.

Hoping her partner didn’t feel her shudder at such thoughts, Olivia pushed her ponderings aside, and let the maskless Louis take her in his arms. She did not gasp when his fingers curled around her waist to touch the small of her back. However, she was a bit shocked by the movement of the dance, for they swayed so close to one another. It was one thing to be face-to-face with one’s sister, but quite another to be held by a man almost as though in an embrace. No wonder many people still found the dance to be shocking. This Louis had them circling, swirling, making sure the wine she’d drunk rushed to her head. He danced well, the nature of his movements revealing this was not the first time he’d danced the waltz. She allowed herself to be swept along by him, her face becoming flushed with pleasure underneath her mask.

Oh, dancing was such a delight! And her partner chatted easily. His hand stayed in place on her waist, thank goodness. What if it had slipped down onto her bottom, like was happening with a couple dancing nearby? She’d simply back out of his arms and dash away, she decided, not caring if she offended her partner or her host.

Fortunately, the Louis who held her knew how to act the gentleman.
A fair dancer and well-behaved
? She began to chat more easily as she chose to trust him for the length of the dance.

Moving with this man was a far cry from dancing with Phoebe. Or even walking with Stratton at her side. Olivia became acutely aware of the smoothness of a young hand touching hers, of the lack of a stoop or a limp, of a mouth that retained all its teeth. The wine in her head no longer made her feel dizzy, but buoyed. She found she really could no longer be sure she’d heard any accent in the man’s voice. If his claim of spending his childhood away from England was true, surely he’d been raised by English nannies? Anyway, English had surely been his first language. Not that it mattered; what mattered was that she’d come out tonight in order to be seen, and this graceful man made her feel he was seeing a bit of her self, despite her mask, and not finding her wanting.

After the dance, he gave her a gallant leg worthy of Louis XIV himself, and led her to the side of the dancing area. His expression was now the reverse of what it had been earlier--now his mouth was sober but his eyes were glittering. It was as though something had occurred, something…well, the only word she could think of to explain her impressions was “exciting”…and that he was making a studied effort not to acknowledge it, either by word or expression. Only his eyes, alight in his face, could not hide the knowledge, speaking eyes that seemed to be saying something in a language she could not quite understand. For a moment, she felt the old, habitual reserve slipping over her again, but she firmly thrust it aside. She opened her mouth to speak, not knowing what she meant to say…anything--but he spoke first.

“I must see to something, dear lady, and therefore must leave your side for now. But please tell me you will still be here for the entertainments that I hear will come after
midnight
?”

Why had he put that little bit of emphasis on midnight? Did he wish to see her without a mask before he committed more time or attention to her? For that matter, was he a bit too eager to abandon her? The huffy feeling that stole over her stung more than a little…but only lasted a moment as she admitted to herself,
As you’ve done to others all evening
.

Pushing notions of injury aside, and even though she’d had no intention of staying, she nodded. “I zink I might,” she said, amazed at the breathlessness of her own voice. It had been caused by the dancing, of course.

He bowed again, taking up her hand just long enough to give her a long look--which, again, gave her pause. She turned away at once, hoping the gesture left him with the impression she was not overly concerned about a meeting that might happen later.

Quickly surrounded by a circle of admiring gentlemen, Olivia gratefully allowed one of them to take her into a country dance. Once out of King Louis’s arms, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the stranger.

She relegated the experience to the back of her mind, knowing there was time enough to think again about the mysterious Louis XIV once midnight crept nearer.

Chapter 2

Ian Drake, the new Viscount Ewald, leaned against a column in his king’s garb, as open to public view as a man could be in such a crowded room. His arms were crossed behind his back, against the column, giving him the look of any other indolent young buck in the room, if one looked beyond the too-warm white wig he wore.

He’d arrived expecting to meet someone tonight. The only problem came from the fact he didn’t know who that someone was to be.
Hadn’t known
, he tested the thought; had he found the French informer?
Perhaps, perhaps.

Ian tried to look around with eyes that weren’t too greedy. Yes, he was here to enact one last duty, but far more importantly, at least to him, was the fact he’d come home.
I am surrounded by Englishmen. These are my people.
By the length of but one day, he’d come to the land he’d been increasingly longing for from afar. He’d not been within her borders for nearly twenty years, not since he was seven.

He’d been to a hundred parties not too dissimilar to this, amid the British who, like he and his small family, had resided away from their land of birth. He believed he knew how to behave--but all the same, he watched these mostly untraveled compatriots with eager, questing eyes.
Who are you? Among you, who am I?

One thing he knew he was: yet a mourner. It was not four months since Mama and Papa had died, carried away by typhus. They’d survived insurrections, and rioting, and once the attack of a knife-wielding servant who’d been placed in their household to spy upon them. Afterward Ian had not even hated the man, whom Papa had clubbed into insensibility with a fireplace poker before turning him over to authorities--for his parents and he had all been spies themselves, and knew the risks of traveling and scheming abroad for King and Country. His brother, Arthur, had been the most disconcerted, because his eyes were already turning to the sea, his part in any espionage being only because he belonged with his family.  Still, the unexpected was all a part of how life unfolded in unsettled places where England required prying eyes. They’d lived in three meager rooms without doors between the four of them, and they’d lived in a grand chalet with a third floor they’d never figured a way to fill or use. They’d seen filth and squalor, and they’d walked on the finest carpets on majestic marble floors. They’d seemed somehow blessed to reside above the touch of the sickness and poverty ever to be found. Yet in the end, with Arthur long since off to his naval career, it had been but a common disease that had taken Papa and a day later, Mama.

Fourteen sluggish weeks after, Papa’s solictors’ letter had reached Ian in Bombay--informing him of something he’d known but little considered: Ian was now the second Viscount Ewald. He was bid to come “home” and assume his duties.

An assumption he could have blithely ignored…except he’d been increasingly thinking about the green island of his birth. He remembered rain, and horses snorting in cool morning air, and pleasant summers that did not bake the sense right out of your head. Even before his parents had passed, hadn’t he been wondering why the charms of Athens, St. Petersburg, or Madrid had started to pale? Hadn’t he begun to ask himself what was home? Hadn’t he begun to envy Arthur his place upon a ship, his clear duty? Had his employment begun to pall because he was never settled anywhere for long? What was his future to be, and where?

And now he was the viscount… Which, among other things, meant there was the responsibility to marry. Only of late, now there was also a
desire
to do so. He would build a new family--but first he must come back his homeland, where he would find his helpmeet.

So, he’d answered the solicitors’s beckoning, and on the long sea journey had truly begun to not only accept but crave the new life promised him by his old country.

However, the previously unknown commander who’d met him on the London dock as he’d come down
The Rajah’s
gangplank had asked one more task of him. “Here in England, you’re unknown, and that’s exactly what we require,” Sir Terrence had told him, stroking his mustache to either side with a finger. “Your monarch asks just one more task of you, that you await our informer’s approach, and you keep this person safe and hidden until secret transport can be arranged.”

“’This person’?” Ian had echoed.

“
Secret,
” Sir Terrence had repeated.

Ian had given it only a minute’s consideration, then nodded his acceptance, taking a written invitation and a fat bag pressed into his hands, and assented to this one last, minor duty.

So for this night he’d dressed out of the bag as a French king--a heavy hint for the unknown informer--and had gone completely unmasked. He had but to wait for the informer to find him at the masquerade.

Or had she already? The lady in the cat costume--she’d had a French accent.

Although, had it been imperfect? Was she faking the accent? Or was she a Frenchwoman trying to echo English tones? If she was trying to hide from French retribution, it would behoove her to try to sound less French…

Certainly, she had gone to some effort to hide her person, if not her form. She’d made her features unknowable, and yet the revealing cut of her gown was arguably more French than English. He’d thought before that the informer could be either a man or a woman, and now he began to remeasure the chance it was the latter. After all, the best place to hide was in a crowd. Especially a crowd where everyone was pretending to be something other than they truly were.

And Lord Quinn’s crowd was an unusual one, make no mistake about that.

Ian turned casually toward a group of smiling revelers, looking into their masked faces, reading the things they said with how they moved, how they placed their bodies. He nodded confirmation at his own thought that he might have found the person he sought.

Yet, years of training told him not to be convinced, not quite yet, that the Lady Cat was his mark.

***

Across the room a woman dressed like a harvest gleaner--complete with an apron over her unrealistically pristine homespun cloth gown, a kerchief tied about her head, no mask, and a basket of
papier mâché
fall fruits--surveyed the room in her turn. The woman made note of every person she could not identify at once and went through the crowd, meeting each until she was sure of their identity. Only a handful of masks proved any challenge.

She knew that an informant, a traitor, had escaped France. She knew this because of the last missive that had been carried to her back door, late at night when all the servants were asleep except for her apprehensive maid Sophie, who brought her any notes and never dared to breathe a word to anyone about them, not with her parents still held in France.

It was the “gleaner’s” newest charge to help learn the location of the escaped informant in England, no doubt meant to make his way to Scotland, the path of other escapees before him. It was her duty to be observant, to provide any information or action needed to stop his flight from justice. Traitors against France must be dealt with, and harshly.

After circling the room, she was satisfied there were only two things she did not know: who was the man dressed as Louis XIV? And who was the woman in the cat costume?

Their unexplained appearances here, in the wake of the knowledge she had received just last night, was suspect. Neither of them was the informant--he wouldn’t dare appear at a
haute ton
affair such as this, surely?

But strangers knew about strange things. It behooved her to make the acquaintance of King and Cat.

***

Not too far outside London, a man swore silently in virulent French. The carriage door was opened for him, but he did not need to climb down from the coach onto the dark road to know a wheel had broken. The terrible crunch and sudden list to the right had told him that.

“How far to walk to the Lord Quinn’s?” He spoke slowly, carefully, trying to sound English. He didn’t think he’d succeeded.

The driver scratched his head and considered.  “It’d take ya’ the better part of an hour, I s’pose.”

The man, Georges Douzain, swore in his head, and gestured at the broken wheel. “Repair it! Quickly!”

The driver tugged at a forelock of dark hair in acknowledgement of the command, and motioned toward the inn only a hundred yards or so up the road. “There’s wine or ale to be had, no doubt,” he told his only passenger. “Pr’aps a horse to be hired?”

Douzain, despite fear and vexation growing by the moment, shook his head. He was safer hidden inside an inn, then back in the coach. “I will wait for you. But you must ’urry.” He reached into the carriage to pull out a stuffed bag, all he had brought with him in this world, and began to walk the road. He kept his hat down and his collar up, even long after he had begun to warm by the inn’s fire, wishing he could afford a private room. The inn boasted a long clock, and Douzain swore quietly again to see it was nearing eleven; midnight approached far too fast.